skullgiver

@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do so many people delete their posts?⁩ ⁨⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  To prevent annoying trolls from digging through my post history, mostly. I’ve seen people do this on Lemmy, one person even had a stalker that would go server to server to reply angrily to their posts because he felt “wronged” somehow. Plus, nobody is reading this stuff after a month anyway, the only readership of old comments is AI scrapers trying to steal my words for their algorithm.

  Of course, deleting stuff on Lemmy doesn’t mean actually deleting anything. You can trivially ignore deletion requests as a server and some seem to keep old copies of deleted content.

  There’s no automated way to do it with Lemmy so I’ve written my own automation tool that occasionally runs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It exists, if just isn’t a solid replacement for normal plastic. It’ll crumble to dust and dissolve before you can actually get any use out of the material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If we replace most plastic with a non plastic alternative and would that really be better?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s also a balance to be struck with single use plastics. Many products don’t last nearly as long without single use wrappers. For luxury products like cookies that doesn’t matter as much, but for certain vegetables getting a plastic wrapping early on can give them much longer shelf lives. There are only so many cucumbers you can consume between harvest and consumption, and ditching plastic wrappings would reduce food availability and probably cause more food to go bad and get wasted.

  The worst part is probably that rich countries getting rid of shelf-life-extending plastic will solve the problem by just importing food products from elsewhere when local harvest season is done and the supplies run out. Poorer countries with less purchasing power will find themselves with more aggressive competition. Even though rich countries have an abundance of food, reducing the accessible food supply will still have an impact on the world.

  As for bringing your own containers: that may work for some places, but not all. No grocery store will let you show up with your ceramic container to carry one of those ready-made salads to the till. The risk of getting into trouble for food safety and the general theft risk is just too great. We can get rid of those single use plastics, but it’d also mean getting rid of pre-packaged meals like that. As for cookies, I don’t get them from my bakery, those cookies are twice as expensive and last half as long. The closest bakery offers mostly-paper bags (though probably covered in PFAS) already.

  Speaking of, for loads of single-use plastics, there aren’t many good alternatives without spreading more PFAS around. Paper isn’t all that great for storing anything that isn’t dry (and it’s still terrible when it rains). Glass can be an alternative, but making and recycling glass requires enough heat to melt it, adding to the CO2 problem. You also can’t store carbonated beverages like soda above a certain volume in glass containers, or you’ll end up with the glass grenades that made the world switch away from glass decades ago.

  Here, plastic bags are still everywhere, but by law they now cost money. Certainly saves on plastic bag usage, but doesn’t eliminate them either. That said, plastic bags aren’t necessarily single use, you can just stuff them into your pocket and reuse them next time you go to the store unless they’re made from especially terrible plastic.

  Of course you don’t need prepackaged individual slices of banana to have their own plastic wrappers, but a surprising amount of single use plastics is better than the alternative when taking other environmental factors into account.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My password is not accepted because it is too long⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The specification of the algorithm specifies up to 56 bytes, including a null terminator. If you’re using UCS-2 (2+ bytes per character, like Windows, Java, Javascript, and more languages and platforms do), that’s 27 characters (can’t use the last half byte character pair). Add some margins for extended characters (emoji and such) and you’ll end up just above or below 24. With UTF-8 you can end up doing much better (exclusively Latin-1) or much worse (exclusively non-Latin character sets). Verifying that on the frontend is a massive pain (string length in JS is unreliable) and dynamically switching codecs is a recipe for bugs and security leaks.

  The 72 byte limit is the result of the internal workings of most bcrypt algorithms, but if you ever switch implementations you need to make sure that implementation doesn’t change the internal workings if you rely on details like that. If the stars align you can use 71 characters (72 if you use Pascal strings), but that’s far from a given.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My password is not accepted because it is too long⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  PayPal did the same. Registration took 40 characters, login only half of that. Editing the login form didn’t work unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My password is not accepted because it is too long⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like they’re using bcrypt. Feeding more than 24 utf8 characters into bcrypt won’t do anything useful. You can permit longer passwords (many sites do) but they’d be providing a false sense of security.

  Bcrypt is still secure enough and 24 characters are fine as long as they’re randomly generated by your password manager.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are roundabouts made?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I always thought these markings were made by machines, until I saw some people draw them by hand. Turns out, you can make near perfect road markings with a movable can of paint. If you use GPS to trace out your track, you can just fill them by hand.

  As for construction, here’s a timelapse of making one using stone tiles: youtu.be/gXiOt-9WCag

  Here’s one made of asphalt: youtu.be/DORBEGYVgYE Note the pre-poured blocks of concrete in the center, which likely help the round shape.

  In this video you can see the imperfect temporary road markings for a short moment: youtu.be/SV2vSL_hiA0

  This video showcases a different style of roundabout that makes two-lane roundabouts a bit easier. Note the two round, concentric lanes separated by concrete barriers: youtu.be/iRclLOgN-xw

  This video showcases the manual driving work done to make the round roads: youtu.be/KCQv24BkI6Y This is a four lane roundabout. The video also shows how the line markings are applied (by a spout, in a car).

  This video shows a prefab concrete roundabout installed over a weekend. All they needed to do was prepare the soil, lay down the blocks and paint the lines: youtu.be/J-BZWfbygkc

  This video shows how the center concrete slabs can be laid on location using a specialised machine: youtu.be/J2g0JZzqbAs

  I’m not sure if this tech is applied, but farmers use millimeter precision GPS to efficiently farm their soil. The GPS receiver itself costs a couple of grand, but making a car in a closed-off road drive in a perfect circle is hardly a technical challenge these days. That said, these people can probably do it by hand and you wouldn’t notice the difference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected from 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  PHP is still massive. I wouldn’t highlight the language, but there’s nothing wrong with using modern PHP for web applications. Most of the world’s websites are probably still based on WordPress, although websites have gotten better at hiding it these days. It’s fast, easy to use, massively popular, and some of the PHP frameworks beat out “modern” languages in terms of features and productivity by a long shot. I know software developers like to joke about older tech like PHP and Java, but it’s what the world still very much runs on, and especially with PHP people seem to have drunk a bit too much of the Kool-Aid.

  Based on bos current CV (shawnfromportland.com/Shawn_K_Resume_2025-8.pdf) I think he should be perfectly employable as-is. Experience with various frontend and backend systems in a wide variety of business segments.

  I can’t see what his CV used to look like (went 404 after HN tore him to shreds it seems) but it seems he’s made four new iterations based on the URL alone. I’m guessing he tried to pivot into the “vibe coding” “AI developer” ecosystem as of late in hopes of catching a trend, because based on his experience I don’t think he needs to hide his actual competence behind AI like that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to fix discord connection while streaming a game?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like a QoS thing, unless your connection is really bad. Assuming your network has the available capacity to game and chat, there’s probably something fucky going on with packet ordering.

  There are tons of different Gamer ™ software packages that could be the culprit, but anything preinstalled by Lenovo would be my first suspect. Also check for anything labeled “Killer” in Device Manager under network or Bluetooth. Killer WiFi (and I think they have an ethernet thing as well?) is sold as a feature on some gaming devices but in my experience its name only rings true in that it’ll kill your gameplay experience.

  Routers can also do QoS fuckery. If you’re on a connection with low upload (DSL, cable) check if your router does network prioritisation/Quality of Service/QoS things. If you have more than enough upload capacity, you could still check and disable the setting to see if that’s the cause.

  Note that while Discord uses barely any network traffic to do voice, it’s very sensitive to latency issues. If you’re capping out the connection to your router (quite easy to do over WiFi or in P2P video calls) you could be transmitting at dozens of megabits a second with more to spare, but your VoIP connection could suck terribly because of latency and jitter.

  Also worth trying: rebooting, if you haven’t already. Clicking “shut down” and then turning your PC on does not reboot it in Windows! It’s stupid but manually clicking reboot in the start menu twice sometimes fixes weird issues like these.

  Lastly, as Discord is peer to peer as far as I know, your bandwidth with some other locations may just not be very good. A gigabit of upload to speedtest.net doesn’t mean you can exchange traffic with your friends directly that fast. You can try to use one of those piracy VPNs to avoid your ISPs network edge and see if that improves things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I fucking hate modern design and modern designers.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t say I care too much about this feature, but looking into it I can’t seem to find any documentation about it at all. Where are you getting this confirmation that you can’t disable it?

  I’d just stop using Steam Chat if it’s not working for you, there are dozens of game chat services specifically built for chatting in games. Then again, I’d probably stop playing with people that make me self–conscious of typing indicators as well.

  Also lol @ anything Valve designs being “modern”. Steam Chat looks, feels, and behaves like MSN Messenger did twenty years ago. Don’t let the gradients fool you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Star Trek: Prodigy’ Is the Perfect Show for Trekkies — Now They Need to Watch It⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Huh, TIL SkyShowtime exists. Yet another streaming service, great! I’ll have to consider it when SNW continues.

  According to the internet it won’t work on my computer or laptop, though, because unlike Netflix and Disney Plus it doesn’t support Linux apparently? And it doesn’t seem like it’ll work on my phone, either, because I’ve had to flash a custom ROM onto that after Xiaomi dropped support a few years ago. Guess I’ll have to try a free trial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[META] Never change, lemmy.ml⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Criticism of communism on Lemmy is like criticising the far right on Truth Social. Whether or arguments are good or not (“communists are basically nazis” just isn’t true), you’re criticising ideals on a platform mostly set up for people disenfranchised for those ideals.

  While I don’t exactly agree with your comment, I find it quite ridiculous that your comment was removed. Just let the downvotes do their job, this didn’t need mod intervention.

  It’s quite unfortunate that so many normal people and communities have concentrated on .ml, unlike Lemmygrad you can’t really defederate .ml without missing out on valuable interaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Its most common use case is interrupting games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Read the popup dialogue next time. It tells you what Sticky Keys is for and how to disable the trigger if you don’t want it.

  Or go to settings > accessibility > sticky keys > “keyboard shortcut for sticky keys”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Its most common use case is interrupting games⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Various diseases and disabilities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, if you misinterpret this question, you’ll probably get the next one. The important thing about these is that you shouldn’t overthink them, they’re not worth the mental effort and they don’t expect serious dedication from you anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The nuance is the entire point of the CAPTCHA. It’s not really hard to go “inside warmer than snowy outside” but I imagine whole groups of neurodivergent people will be getting locked out by these.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This is exactly the type of thing a bot sucks at. Training image recognition or text recognition is trivial. Training concepts such as perceived temperature requires state of the art LLMs.

  This isn’t the only question, of course. It’ll stick around until bots are trained for temperature. Then it’ll ask “which of these would make a good picnic spot” or “which of these are big enough to contain an apple”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Captcha⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  To kick out bots. AI can bypass normal CAPTCHAs better than humans can, so “select the traffic light” and “type these letters” won’t work anymore.

  Now CAPTCHAs are becoming a test in actual mental capacity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨this⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  User friendly CAPTCHAs have been defeated. Current technology relies on extensive fingerprinting but if you want to take out bots using that, you’ll also be taking out anyone not on Windows 10+/macOS with GPU drivers installed and no fingerprint resistence.

  “Type these letters” is no longer a good filter. Neither is basic math or recognising words. Even these dice games can be done by ChatGPT just fine once you bypass the “I can’t do CAPTCHAs” limitation that they put in front of it.

  We used to be able to make CAPTCHAs just slightly more difficult. Add in some colours, blur the edges some more, use different fonts. That’s no longer an option; CAPTCHAs need to be increased in cognitive complexity instead.

  This is a huge problem. As AI becomes more advanced, more disabled people will start losing access to services because they can’t get through the CAPTCHAs. Audio transcription AI is becoming more advanced by the month and I expect audio CAPTCHAs to soon become unusable. These more complex puzzles, which AI can’t automatically describe, will also cause sighted and mentally disabled people to lose access. The days of CAPTCHAs are soon over.

  I can see three solutions for this, and all of the suck donkeyballs.

  One is remote attestation tied to a hardware key (the thing Google tried to add and the thing Apple has added to Safari). Your access will be determined by your possession of real hardware. If someone hacks the manufacturer of your device and steals the keys, your access will soon be revoked. However, this requires bots to buy real devices, which makes them too costly to operate at huge scales. Running Linux or older versions of Windows/macOS will make accessing the internet impossible.

  A variant of this is the “apps for everything” outcome, where websites will stop being useful and tell you to install an app instead. Apps can do a lot more (invasive) analysis of your system, and existing DRM solutions should keep most bots out.

  Another is to just put pay walls and accounts in front of everything. No spam bot or crawler will pay a dollar for every account they need to create.

  The last one is to centralise on a few hosting providers which can use traffic analysis across many websites to determine bot status. No more VPNs, even more websites behind Cloudflare, but simple, accessible CAPTCHAs.

  The non-solution is to try and cling to CAPTCHAs. Soon CAPTCHAs will start excluding anyone under some kind of education level that’ll affect a significant portion of the population, but it’ll maintain the status quo for most neurotypical people.

  Many websites already employ a combination of these measures, and it’s only going to get worse. For general accessibility and for keeping the internet free and somewhat democratic, I’m putting my money on option one: remote attestation. Hardware trust can be implemented in free operating systems (many people will get huffy about it but I’m sure they’ll prefer it to not being able to use the internet) and older systems will take a hit, but it’s the best of the outcomes I can see.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Ignoring the reboot doesn’t work when it’s a reboot to the Nvidia driver, as I’ve found out. The displays will work but Vulkan/OpenGL will break in confusing ways with error messages that point in the wrong direction.

  I don’t really understand why more Linux don’t hot replace the kernel, Ubuntu can do it and so can a bunch of enterprise Linux variants. I assume there’s some kind of design limitation that prevents other distros from using that API.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  These issues are common for people running bleeding edge Linux like me, it’s just something you accept when you use code that was finished a week ago rather than wait for it to be tested for stability for months like most Windows code.

  You don’t get that stuff on Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora, or course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay fresh⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Image A excellent shit post

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You say that, but Discord will happily refuse to open until you download the latest .deb file from their website, and it’s one of the friendlier Electron applications in terms of in-window updating in my experience.

  I had to disable my adblock to get the Teams application to show me a button I needed at some point…

  One interesting thing I’ve heard from people I’ve introduced into Linux is that you need to reboot an awful lot. It has to do with automatic security updates triggering a reboot-required flag, but every other day I get a popup with “updates were installed, you should reboot”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just want to set a timer for MY FOOD WINDOWS WHY?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t remember any version of Windows I actively use ever auto updating for me either, but that’s because I turned that shit off myself. I had a test VM reboot itself at some point, but it recovered itself perfectly so I only noticed it because the open Firefox tabs all appeared to have unloaded by themselves.

  You don’t need to know any programming languages to use Linux, and if you’re a nornal computer user and buy a Mac you don’t need to compile anything either. You’re also free from Microsoft’s stupid advertising and Edge sabotage.

  I’ll have you know the reason why my laptop didn’t display over a dock isn’t because of bingbong-SDK, but rather because Linux 6.1 altered a kernel API that evdi 1.14 didn’t support, hence breaking the DisplayLink driver written by Synaptic, thank you very much. But yeah, this stuff does happen occasionally and it sucks. But hey, the problem wasn’t Nvidia’s terrible software for once!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are 144hz screen possible?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Of course, and that’s why European Youtubers will sometimes upload video in 4k@50fps (because the grid frequency in Europe is 50Hz instead, and that’s what a lot of cameras are configured for to prevent banding).

  Syncing with the power grid is one of those great ideas that lead to some very silly side effects, like that time the grid frequency in Europe sagged for a while and everyone’s alarm clocks started drifting. Grid operators increased the frequency slightly over the following months to correct the clocks as well, so if you adjusted your alarm clock you’d need to adjust it again!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How are 144hz screen possible?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The 60 rule is actually based on a 59.97 rule and it’s not really a rule, just a standard that stuck around. What’s better than 60? Two times 60! What’s better than two times 60? Four times sixty!

  With VRR you can run certain screens that get sold right now at exactly 91.3 fps if you want, it’s just extremely unpractical.

  CRT monitors actually used to run at higher refresh rates (120Hz CRTs came way before anything close to flat panels were introduced) but the shitty limitations of the first ten years of flat panels changed the way displays were used and marketed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Restaurant Bill⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There is no “EU” culture about any of this. Every country has its own culture and acceptable ideas. All I know is that you have to be made aware of any surcharges before they’re applied, but I’m pretty sure things work exactly the same in America.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d find random hospitality surcharges when you walk into a random restaurant in Amsterdam or Paris. What are you going to do, sue the restaurant? Call the cops? As much as I like living here, it’s not like this is some kind of utopia where scummy businesses don’t exist and where the government always enforces customer protection laws everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Restaurant Bill⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve only come across it in ex-Soviet European countries, but every country is different of course. Tourist traps also like adding fees and surcharges but I don’t think they do it for the same reason.

  I remember something about tipping bring associated with bribes getting mentioned in a documentary I watched years ago, but i can’t even begin to remember what documentary that was, let alone find a link to it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Restaurant Bill⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think so, as long as the fee is made clear before getting the bill (e.g. indicated on the menus and signs outside). It’s definitely legal in Europe, assuming you were warned beforehand. It’s very common in some European countries (while entirely nonexistent in others).

  In countries where tipping isn’t traditionally acceptable (like in places where it’s associated with bribing), service surcharge often replace the tipping. Charging a service surcharge and then suggesting a tip is ridiculous though.

  I simply wouldn’t tip after that surcharge, but then again I’m European.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Taking self-appreciation to the next level⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Based on the original article the guy left a trail of destruction. Clearly has no idea how to properly cut or maintain hedges.

  The original article mentions at least one address, and based on Streetview from two years ago I don’t get the impression that these people don’t maintain their hedges at all. There are clear signs of work having been done either by people who have been doing so for a while or by some kind of landscaping company.

  To me, this looks more like a “bored, grumpy old man destroys peoples’ hedges” story.